Wait Until Dark

Chapter 7

7

A hand reached for her. It was a hand Connie knew like no other.

It reached for her, begging for help. Only the hand showed, reaching through a tear in the skin of a shattered helicopter.

The heat of fire brushed her cheeks. And she breathed in the stench of kerosene igniting as Jet A fuel poured from a sheared gas tank onto the fire.

Her hands were too heavy. Too slow. Too weak. As her fingers reached out, the hand slid out of reach. The helicopter’s carcass falling away, tumbling earthbound while she remained trapped in the sky.

Trapped where…

Someone shook her shoulder. Shook it again.

By reflex, she grabbed the hand’s ring finger and flipped it back hard, eliciting a sharp yelp. Her attacker withdrew rapidly, tumbling away to get clear of the pain as her instincts continued to drive the finger up and back.

Tumbling like a helicopter falling through a perfectly blue sky.

A big finger, a big hand. She didn’t know this hand. It wasn’t her father’s.

Then she was awake and instantly knew the hand. Had been impressed by its combination of strength and finesse throughout the long repairs, its ability to make the finest adjustments or bend a panel by hand to custom fit an airframe that had been through too much battle to easily fit factory-fresh parts.

Connie let go immediately and tried to stammer out an apology as Big John began to massage his hand tentatively, as if he weren’t sure it were safe to touch.

“We’re landing in five.”

Major Beale’s voice sounded over the intercom. Five minutes. Kabul air base.

Connie leaned forward and offered to inspect John’s hand.

He withdrew it quickly and banged his elbow on the cargo door frame. He hissed out a sharp breath.

“Everything okay back there?”

“Fine, Major.” His answer rough and abrupt. “Banged my goddamn funny bone. Zinging like hell.”

Again Connie could only sit and watch. Retreating meant she didn’t care. Assistance from her clearly wasn’t wanted or welcome. Helpless once again, she could do nothing but sit and watch as they touched down.

“They’re waiting to load us now,” Major Beale announced before John could stop clutching his elbow and cursing.

“Who?” He looked at his hand and flexed the fingers. That was going to sting far longer than his elbow. Connie didn’t look like a fighter. He had to remember that you didn’t get to SOAR without being the best. Minimum five years in the Army and two years of SOAR training before being declared mission-qualified, if you survived the entrance exams. A weeklong interview that he remembered with abject horror. It had made the month of Green Platoon training that followed feel like a cakewalk—almost.

“Try looking out your window.”

He hitched himself up to his knees and looked out the shooter’s window. He could feel Connie move behind him to peek over his shoulder. An absolute awareness that made him think thoughts he definitely shouldn’t about a woman serving beside him.

He didn’t see anything but a curving wall of gray. Connie slid open the cargo door as the rotor wash eased and the engines wound down. Kabul, with its own unique odor of spiced lamb, too much mint, and fresh sewage.

Then his brain got the perspective.

Not a gray wall, but rather the side of a C-17 Globemaster III. Not a C-5, but still three stories tall of aircraft the length of half a football field.

What it also told him was that he had to wake up fast. He flexed his hand again before unsnapping his monkey line, stowing it neatly, and stepping out of the Hawk. Before the hour was out, he was going to wish he’d found a way to wake Connie without touching her.

He was assaulted by the typical mayhem of a military airfield.

The C-17 loomed above them, a towering mass in the night, each of her four jet engines about the size of the Hawk’s cabin area.

Viper, Major Henderson’s bird, had landed on the other side of the jet’s tail. As John watched, the lower part of the C-17’s tail unhinged and a massive ramp swung down to the ground. Two DAP Hawks on a jet transport meant something nasty was going on, that was for sure. And if they were ready to load… It was time to hustle and ignore the armament and fueling crews already swarming toward their birds.

John reached back into the cabin for a wrench. One slapped into his hand. Connie had already assessed the situation and was on the move with a wrench of her own.

He hated morning people. After a decade in the Army, he still preferred to take a quiet half hour, maybe an hour. Get coffee, and a plate of eggs and bacon, English muffin with strawberry jam, and a short stack if he was lucky—before he ever considered being awake. Didn’t happen all that much, but that was his preference. He’d slept three of the last thirty hours on a hard deck and now had to prepare his bird for transport.

He climbed up the toeholds leading to the top of the Black Hawk as he had twenty-four hours earlier. At least here at Bagram Air Base, there was less chance of someone shooting him from the top of the nearest dune. The first order of business was folding back the rotors. Thankfully without having to saw off the blades this time.

They rotated the fixed blade until it was aligned with the still-battered tail section. Next they broke free the second blade’s pins and swung it alongside its companion. As they tackled the next blade Connie actually spoke.

“How’s the hand?”

John flexed it and tried to ignore the twinge that ran up the length of his arm.

He offered a noncommittal grunt.

By the time the next blade swung into place she spoke again. “I don’t like being touched.”

“I guessed.” Actually, he’d been worried. When she slept, the chill facade she usually wore—no, not chill. Aloof? Remote? Anyway, it had slipped off her like a shield set aside.

He’d woken to find her asleep beside him. And he’d watched her face. No longer so carefully expressionless. No longer under the fierce control she always wielded. Her sleeping face reflected her sleeping thoughts. A gentleness that spoke of the woman more than the mind within. Then, after he’d studied her enough to know he’d not forget a single aspect of her face any time soon, not the high cheeks, not the ever so slightly flattened tip of her nose, not the surprising length of her lashes, unobservable under the impact of those sharp, assessing eyes when they were open.

Then an abrupt shift: worry, strain—horror! He’d shaken her then to break her free from whatever so shrouded her features in terror.

And nearly had his finger dislocated as a reward. Who knew what would have happened to him if he’d followed his first instinct and gathered her sleeping form into his arms.

“I’m sorry. I was—”

John left her the space of silence as they broke the double-pivot free and swung the forward blade back in line with the tail. It was perhaps the first time she’d voluntarily started a conversation, instead of only responding to a direct question.

“I’m sorry.” She moved away to fold down the tail rotor. John reinserted the pin bolts before climbing down. Down onto a pallet. A pallet of parachutes. Big ones. s**t.

He hated parachutes.